The Wastes had never seen such a sight. Hundreds of skinwalkers stormed the roads in broad daylight, their giggles and howls filling the air. The hostis humani generis paid no attention to the shocked travelers; their ced the roofs of occasional trucks. Some skinwalkers leapt, c wide swaths of nd, often nding in the middle of a poputed ter or close to dipidated refueling stations, waving to the stunned popuce who expected instah. New Breeds and soldiers sprang into a, reading their ons and preparing their powers.

  Amusement, and not her own, threateo droha as the warlnashed both sets of fangs, firmly in trol of the wave of fear. The restoration of her psyche made this task almost impossible; excruciating pain pulsed through her body, starting in her brain, exploding down and hitting her heart the hardest, shaking her insides and bohe ck of callous ess shattered her tration, and the warlrowled, using every reserve of her body to keep herself from passing out. Not yet. She had to keep an iron grip on the wild rabble, lest they cheat.

  The skinwalkers shared their vision with her, already figuring out how to take full advantage of the psychiion. O paused for a moment, poio a smuggler at the station, and told a vilge elder that the man was ripping him off by overcharging him for simple mining equipment by a vast amount. She then plucked a pale-skinned woman from among the smugglers, examined her, a her down, exposio the shocked crowd as an Iternian.

  Alpha focused on the fallen sister’s brain, puncturing a vessel there to a satisfied grunt from the creature, apanied by a whiff of disappoi at the interrupted bargaining on behalf of the vilgers. The killing mae stomped, rag toward the wall faster than most known aircraft.

  In a wave of torted limbs, spinning torsos, barrel-rolling bodies, and graceful leaps, the ultimate predators surged toward the Wall, oblivious to any dangers and invitialiation. The Dynast had long since tacted the officer in charge and ordered him to stand down, but several soldiers still fired reflexively at the army of madness nearing their positions. Some monsters ran on their arms, others deliberately limped on a broken leg, never falling behind their ranks. Sensing their growing boredom, Alpha increased her influeruggling to assert her authority.

  Iy, she had little of it. The Fallen obeyed her out of kinship and love, and suotions were less thaing to these beings. A trickle of blood dripped from her nose.

  Do not harm our allies!

  We have allies? ant to meet! Me first. No, me! A cacophony of malevolent joy elicited a groan of pain from the warlord. So potent, so noisy!

  The crazed crowd streamed into the minefield, opping. Soldiers in the bunkers and those on reaissance were too slow to read stopped, praying for their lives or saying goodbye as everything around them erupted and dark shadows, rger than most Wolfkins and Orais, flickered in the dust.

  A skinwalker g an arm stomped out of the rising cloud, s a group of soldiers, and caught a fired bullet in her jaws. She swallowed it and stroked a young boy’s cheek, advising him to fess his feelings to his friend before anirl snatched up such a delicious hunk. Theted the man on the bad disappeared as he weakly tried to expin that he wasn’t gay. No one in his unit was calm enough to tease him about the revetion.

  Wounds and injuries closed in on the perfect bodies, lost limbs pushed back from stumps and in from the horizon covered by detonated mines, and jaundiced eyes locked on the humans as the creatures scaled the wall, reag the top in seds. Their mindless chatter and greetings filled the air; briefly shaking hands with their allies, the skinwalkers made themselves at home and hurried into the bastion’s depths, pursuing their own ends.

  Operators in the aer jumped as the reinforced doors crumbled and a pale thing appeared inside, berating the anding officer for such meager defenses and pointing out the smugglers’ routes on the map. fused and pahe cooks found themselves pushed aside as another skinwalker cocted a disgusting cuisio her taste. Gng at the men and women vomiting from the inteench, she swallowed the resulting soup in one gulp, belg and releasing a stream of greenish mist that eroded a hole in a stone wall.

  But in the ensuing chaos, the skinwalkers had not fotten their goal. A group of them tinkered with the artillery above, dismantling batteries and reassembling them inter, less dependable versions. Then the madwomen climbed inside, and the ons fired them south before falling apart as their sides infted and burst. A smaller gathering of self-mutiting horrors treated themselves to the relics found at an excavation site.

  They cleared out a hangar, callously hurling aCs as if they were mere children’s toys, and told the enraged engineering crew not to worry. In the ter of the hangar ced a round, shiny silver disk, twenty meters in diameter, and around it rose towers of interected maes from abandoned boratories. Stists and pany officials pleaded and shouted into the smiling muzzles that they hadn’t catalogued the findings yet, and no one khe extent of the danger.

  “Don’t fret, dummy.” A skinwalker distracted herself from eg the disk to bastion’s geors. “It’s a teleportation station. Banned because of its dramatic side effects on the human body. Museum exhibit. See? Simple!”

  “Wait, but about the rest of the stuff…” The chief stist overseeing the transport of the lost teology started, and in that sed, the bastio dark, its energy briefly drained into the disk.

  A white light blihe humans temporarily, and when it disappeared, there was no trace of the skinwalkers. The disk glowed, being the sole source of light in the room; its edges melted, and the structure colpsed in on itself to the angry cries of the stists, who mourhe loss of such valuable equipment. The stists wept as they watched the molten pool widen and e the rest of their precious discoveries.

  The remainder maniacs simply jumped from the wall and traversed the ground, sg everyohey came across. And the stro of their kind, a woman fit to be a warlord if not for an unfortunate curse, had spent aire minute in the aer reading all she could about the Gilded Horde. Then the skinwalker broke away from the crowd, heading somewhere to the southwest.

  Stop. Alpha demanded, and the strain busted her eardrum.

  Unch your tits, sis. The skinwalker replied, sending a ripple through the warlord’s stomao foul, promise. I have another morsel in mind.

  It was impossible to trol or restrict her. For the first time in her life, Alpha uood how one-sided their retionship was. The creature slipped out of the web of her fear wave, severing the e and denying any information with a single push of her psyche. Alpha left her alone, wary of her eroding trol over the rest of the host.

  Bleeding from every orifice, Alpha withe horror she had unleashed upon the Core Lands and prayed to the Spirits that she would have enough strength to send them back. The front row of her fangs shattered, and a new set appeared, pierg the twitg pate. Cold sweat covered her shaking body as she ehe devastation.

  The Gilded Horde forces had already seized several farms oskirts of Magoda, mercilessly shooting down poli who tried to iate a truce. The invaders ransacked the captured buildings and lined up their prisoners for future interrogatioiful vineyards stood abandoned and broken; greenhouses y destroyed by the passing hoverbikes, and bees buzzed in the air, stirred by the fttening of their hives on the meadows. War came to the region.

  New images fshed in Alpha’s eyes, a family of four trying to escape the jeering hordemen who took their time toying with them, cutting off the group by rag past them, and cruel bdes wounding the husband who held two small children high, trying to keep them safe. Finally, uo walk as deep cuts reached the bones of his legs, he hahe children to the woman and prepared to buy some time for his family.

  His valiant sacrifice was interrupted as the wet giants transted into real space. Blinded, fyed, muscles twitg in the wind, bones glistening and nerves seared away, the skinwalkers growled and ughed, enjoying and hating this new experience. Without a mistake, cws caught the hoverbike aimed at the man, and the rider yelled in terror as he looked at the bud-like eyes f in the skull. The gruesome fiook the man apart, first the skin, then the muscles and ligaments, followed by the ans and finally the bones, spreading this horrible, still living tapestry on the ground for his rades to see.

  Skinwalkers rained from above, breaking from the craters and ramming into the ranks of the hordemen. Alpha knew many of them from their days as Wolfkins, but now she struggled to identify a single one. Ohey had been proud and loyal soldiers, traio excel, veterans of tless skirmishes and wars, trusted rades and revered protectors. No trace of their former selves remained. Each creature fought as an individual, often dang amidst the bullets, calg their trajectory, or deliberately letting bullets fired by panicked hands pierce their bodies. Then cws would collect said hands, and gleeful smiles would widen, soothed by the screams of panid pain spilling around them.

  This was the true horror of skinwalkers. Their bodies regeed most wounds, their intelligence almost rivaled Ravager’s, and wheasted flesh, they became their victims, down to the st thought. But it was malid innate selfishhat caused them to be a dao everything. They cared nothing for self-preservation and had no clear goals otlefields except to satisfy their own det desires. Even the skinwalkers’ willio obey Alpha’s restris stemmed in part from their joy and loyalty ter. But even that would not st forever, and already they were casting hungry g the rescued civilians.

  The smallest skinwalkers stood four meters tall. To them, the hordemen were prey, and one pointed a fi the enemy leader, whose face was cealed by a skull mask. The woman ughed, amused by a snort from the thunder bull, and the raider pointed his axe at the nearby captives. The ugher died, and the skinwalker luo stand tall before the prisoners, spping herself in the chest in challenge.

  An energy discharge, meant to be used against fortifications, left the bde of the axe and smmed into her chest at the speed of light, blowing up everything above the woman’s waist and leaving her legs standing. The skull bastard ughed ptuously and prepared to hurl another bolt when the legs took a step and he froze in fusion, much to Alpha’s delight.

  Scum using hostages deserved nothihaermination.

  Bones, already coiled into muscles, shot up from the carved waist to reform the skeleton; red fountains carried up ans and blood vessels to rebuild the destroyed chest, arms, and neck. From the open stump of the neck, a new head emerged, every bit as ugly as before, smiling with several rows of sharp fangs. A siep carried the skinwalker beh the thunder bull; the ehe beast’s belly and bathed in its entrails. The skull-faced hordeman tried to flee, oblivious to the skinwalker rising from the tortured animal’s back. Cws sshed at the metal mask, and soon it was thrown to the ground beside the mutited body.

  Cellur regeion. The curse had grafted the skinwalkers with this gift, perhaps as pensation for the stolen sanity. These beasts differed from even the meed types, springing back to life after a blow to the head and suffering no short-term memory loss. To kill a skinwalker food, you had to burn through her internal reserves until she had nothiee or destroy her brain long enough for her to accept death. Nothing less would suffice.

  The mundane sughter soon bored the butchers. Frenzied eyes blinked, plotting; paws gathered broken hoverbikes aooled them into bombs that exploded in a shower of electric arcs, shredding enemies and skinwalkers alike. Instead of abs blows, some skinwalkers turned blurry, perf feats of speed and precision worthy of Sword Saints. Bullets and pulse rounds no longer even touched their bodies, and a flick of a paw sliced enemy soldiers into a dozen pieces. o them were butchers, slowly pulling out legs and arms and arranging them into unholy sculptures before impaling the limbless cripples on found iron poles.

  It wasn’t a battle. It was never a battle. This was a ival of horror, where monsters devoid of even a shred of morality or dedulged in every possible form of degeneracy. Caught in the middle of pilging, the enemy’s forever stood a ce. Alpha blinked, worried for the safety of the captives as a skinwalker teo the rescued family, bandaging the man’s wounds, then mouhe thunder bull’s head and used its carcass as a couch for the humans to sit on.

  “Now, why do you assume you’ll never get over this?” She addressed the womauring at the age around her and catg a bullet before it could hit a kid. She gave it to the boy and closed his unresponsive palm around it. “A gift.”

  “I… I…” the woman stammered. “This is madness! It’s inceivable!”

  “It is very inceivable,” the skinwalker assured her, crossing her arms. “To your left, one hundred and fifty-one are dying; to yht, a graveyard of screaming bodies. See, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing you ’t uand. And the act of dying is not madness; it is the natural rea of a human body uhe influence of suffit trauma. People have been dying for millions of years…”

  Stop pretending to be a soothsayer! Alpha’s kidtened inside her body.

  “The correct term is a therapist, sis.” The skinwalker waved her arm at the fused looks. “Ig, ghost talk. Regardless, you, my friends, are too fixated on the here and now, misinterpreting the potential future as a result, thinking that that bother…” She rolled her eyes and stomped on a crawling raider dead. “No manners at all; respect the session, please! Where was I…”

  “You were talking about our future,” a little girl dared to say before her brother ed his arms around her for prote, g at the skinwalker’s wide smile.

  “Thank you. See, you mistakenly think that today’s unfortunate event will st forever, which, let’s face it, it will not.” A rivulet of blood spshed over the skinwalker. “Don’t be armed by a temporary panid depression; sidering the circumstances, it is more than natural, but what you must uand is that our lives move on and memories tend to fade, lessening the burden you feel now. You have wonderful children and the o care about them…”

  I will murder you with a spoon! Alpha’s mental roar caused the creature to blink mid-speech.

  Tease. Came the wordless reply. You ’t hold a spoon.

  Alpha wasn’t sure what to do. If she pushed, the skinwalker could have verbally torn the family apart. The skinwalkers’ lies and half-truths were known to drive people to suicide. These beasts did it for no other reason than fun. Sisterhood, duty, obligation, and simply being human no longer existed for these creatures; there was only them, for now and forever, and the world was their toy.

  Ravager was an exception to that rule. They collectively viewed her as a mother, amused by the madhat gripped the ander. Alpha was the sed exception. The skinwalkers wao see her fall. And Zero... she served as their treasured adversary.

  The sughter tinued, and Alpha shuddered in intense pain. A lung. She had just lost a lung. The vision darkened, breathing became harder, and she held her dominiohe skinwalkers to the end, whipping them from feasting on the corpses and reminding them of their deal. After the remnants of the Horde army turail and ran, she slipped into a restorative a, issuing orders not to harm the civilians even as most of her body failed.